Real life has really been impacting on my post-writing time in the last fortnight or so… definitely not part of the annual plan which is for 3-4 contemporary posts each week…such is life…so this post is really just to keep my profile above the radar horizon…

On the up side I have been accepted into the RNZAF and I have been very pleasantly surprised at how painless this process has been on the Air side…what has been tying up a large proportion of my time is getting out of the Army Reserves in order to join another service…which has not been anything like as simple as you might think…

31 March is also the end of the commercial financial year here and I have been doing the year end accounts for Carmen’s business – this is the first time I have done it all from scratch and getting all the bits and pieces organised into a coherent picture for the accountants has been ‘interesting’ – that’s interesting in the same sense as the Chinese curse…and, yes, I am getting soft: while renovating the study, I’ve had to shift the computer down to the dining table. An upside of this is that I can have TV or a movie on while I am working as I do seem to function better with some background activity; the downside is that the chairs around the dining table are hard wood and not that comfortable on butt or back…any extended periods of work tends to become feats of endurance…like I said, getting soft…

Winter’s first snow 9 June 2010

Winter is quite clearly here now so we’ll also gearing up to run the guest house over the ski season so we’re doing final tidy-up and touch-up projects around the property before the season opens…

I’m off to a workshop on aspects of hybrid war next week (touch wood and so long as the snow doesn’t close the road) and am thinking that the nights, rather than spend them in the bar, might be an opportunity to progress so paper projects like the Kitakami which is a rather unusual looking cruiser with four gun turret and ten quadruple torpedo turrets, designed against the requirements of naval battles like those around Guadalcanal in 1942 and 1943…this can be my night time away project…

…and the big 1/32 Heritage Aviation Vulcan will remain my at-home spare time project…this thing is a real pig…it was my gift to me after Carmen sold a property in 2008…at the time it seemed like a great project and an impressive attention-getter when completed and on display…as one of only 25 models built it cost an arm and a leg and it’s size meant that just getting it to New Zealand from the UK was a major pain..

…but that pain was nothing compared to finding that it only bears the flimsiest resemblance to any version of the actual aircraft and that by the time all the errors are fixed, I might as well build it from scratch…but…due to the cost involved and the lack of a local market to sell it on (especially since it’s reputation as model now precedes it), it has had to become a builder as the domestic issues arising from keeping this level of investment as a hangar queen in the garage are just too great. So, slowly, piece by piece, I’m building it as close as I can get it to an original straight wing Vulcan before they started to do all sorts of ugly things to the wings…with parallel build threads on Large Scale Planes and Paper Modeling – a completed build can be seen on Britmodeller…

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho…it’s not snowing or raining at the moment so it’s off to (outside) work I go…